Study after study shows that despite the best efforts of marketing specialists to engage their target audiences with interesting, memorable e-mailed content, often those efforts fall on blind eyes or deaf ears.

A just-released analysis by online presentation firm Prezi confirms this dynamic once again. The study was conducted by presentation software developer Prezi in concert with cognitive neuroscientist Carmen Simon. It found that four in five consumers forget most of what they read in e-mails after just three days or less.

Even worse, approximately half of them cannot recall even one single thing about what they’ve read.

The Prezi study went further in that it attempted to find out the reasons for forgetting the content. Here’s what’s behind all the forgetfulness:

Irrelevant content: ~55%

No motivation to remember the content: ~36%

There’s too much information to retain: ~30%

Distractions: ~18%

Stress: ~9%

The takeaway from this is that people aren’t forgetting content for “existential” reasons, but rather due to the nature of the content itself.

… Which brings us back to the challenge marketers face to make their content interesting and worthwhile enough to engage audiences.

It’s pretty well-accepted that the most compelling content possesses one or more of the following “VEEU” characteristics:

Counterbalancing these terms are words that actually depress interest and engagement. Interestingly, some of the biggest “killer” terms are ones that conjure up images of the classroom: Few people want to feel like they’re being lecture to, evidently.

According to Jay Schwedelson, CEO of marketing performance metrics firm Worldata, which conducted research based on more than 5 billion e-mails transmitted during 2017, his company’s research found that the word “training” had a negative impact (response depressant) of ~8% when used in e-mail subject lines.

The word “learn” had a similar dampening effect of ~7% when used as part of the subject line.

For the record, here is a list of some oft-used terms that turn out to be “engagement dampeners” – at least to some degree:

Remember (~11% dampening effect)

Chat (~11%)

Meeting (~10%)

Training (~8%)

Learn (~7%)

Featured (~6%)

Popular belief has it that “question-type” subject lines aren’t a very good idea either, because they introduce a sense of “low energy softness” and project a lack of purposeful action. But the Worldata analysis shows a different result, determining that e-mail subject lines presented in the form of a question tend to drive higher open rates (by approximately 10%).

I’m old enough to remember – as an adult! — Maryland’s infamous “blue laws,” which mandated that practically no retail establishments could be open for business on Sundays. It was a way for retail employees to have a day off with their families, even if other consumers wanted to do their shopping on the weekends.

The state saw itself as the protector of those workers against “exploitation” by retail establishments out to maximize their sales and profits.

There were exceptions to the law, of course – such as restaurants and grocery stores which were allowed to be open. But for the most part, strip malls and other retail zones were eerily quiet on Sundays.

Eventually, public pressure for the convenience of weekend shopping became too intense, and the state legislature finally abolished the antiquated restrictions in the 1980s.

It seems the same kind of dynamics are at play these days in the world of e-commerce — not by intent but by end-result. A just-released analysis by e-mail services provider Yesmail reveals that e-mails sent on Saturdays generate more than 60% better conversion rates than the average. On Sunday, it’s 40% higher-than-average sales.

Those findings come from an analysis of more than 7 billion e-mails deployed over Yesmail’s platform during the second quarter of 2016.

Clearly, shopping habits are similar whether it’s electronic or physical. But interestingly, it is e-mails sent on Thursdays that generate the highest engagement levels (open rates and clickthrough rates). It seems that consumers respond well to an initial e-mail sent on a Thursday, with a follow-up communication over the weekend to cement the sale.

Just as the physical retail stores were losing out on a good deal of business on Sundays, e-commerce firms may well be leaving money on the table today – simply because their employees’ work schedules — weekdays — don’t conform neatly to when so much of the shopping action is taking place with consumers.

Sending e-mail messages during the weekend, when work e-mails slow down, offers marketers the opportunity to stand out from a crowded inbox. But that isn’t happening as much as one might expect. Chad White, a research director at Litmus Software, notes this:

“Most B-to-C promotional e-mails are sent Monday through Friday because that’s when corporate offices are open. It’s certainly not because consumers aren’t in their inboxes over the weekend — because they are … which makes sense because consumers are less busy over the weekend and tend to do an outsized proportion of their shopping then.”

Just as the pattern has been for the past three or four decades, really.

That’s what makes the activities of some retailers in the online arena so curious. There are all sorts of ways for business enterprises to plan and schedule e-deployments at a prescribed date or time. The weekend calendar and when marketers are or are not working really shouldn’t any sort of impediment. Funny how something as simple as that fails to make it into the mix sometimes …

One of the benefits of digital marketing is that there’s no dearth of data pertaining to the deliverability rates of “marketing” e-mail messages.

That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that those deliverability rates are dropping in nearly every geographic and industry category.

Those are the key takeaway findings in the new global figures released by Return Path in its 2015 Deliverability Benchmark Report. This year, e-mail deliverability rates are sitting at approximately 79%, meaning that around one in five e-mails are not reaching their intended recipients. (Both spam trap e-mails and missing e-mails are included in the stats.)

More troubling is the trend line. In 2014, only 17% of e-mails failed to reach their intended recipients.

The Return Path statistics are particularly important because of the sheer size of the analysis it conducted. The 2015 report analyzed inbox placement statistics by country and industry in addition to e-mail provider, based on a representative sample of the ~357 million e-mail marketing messages tracked by Return Mail and involving ~150 mailbox providers. The evaluation covered permission-based e-mail messages sent between May 2015 and April 2015.

In the United States, deliverability rates are faring worse than elsewhere. It experienced one of the sharpest declines in deliverability, going from 87% in 2014 down to 76% this year.

Most other countries experienced declines as well — just not the same degree. They include Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Only Italy and Brazil saw increased deliverability percentages (Italy by a little … Brazil by a lot), while Spain’s deliverability rate remained the same (at 76%).

Consumer-type industries tend to have the highest deliverability reporting, according to Return Path (typically 90% or greater). Deliverability is far lower in the industrial, software and technology sectors, with rates hovering in the 45% to 65% range.

The introduction of new spam filtering systems, including those for Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Increasingly sophisticated algorithms applied based on user behaviors, designed to counterbalance the increased volume of e-mail traffic overall (~16% higher in just the past two years).

Additional findings from the 2015 Return Path evaluation can be reviewed in this summary report, along with a detailed description of the study methodology.

It would be interesting to know if individual companies are experiencing similar trends in their own e-marketing programs. If anyone has particular perspectives to share, please do so for the benefit of other readers.

What is perhaps the latest definitive study on e-mail usage and behavior has just been published.

The research was a joint effort by Cornell University and Yahoo, and evaluated some 16 billion e-mail messages sent by more than 2 million people over a three-month period.

What the analysis found is that people have pretty set habits in how they work with their e-mail.

In a sense, we’re not so different today from back in the days of postal mail, when people had a predetermined time they looked at the daily mail based on when the letter carrier typically showed up at their house or place of business.

So, what are today’s behavior patterns when it comes to e-mail? Here are some of the salient findings from the Yahoo/Cornell study:

O As people receive more e-mails, they increase their response activity, but not enough to compensate for the higher load.

O Half of all replies are done fewer than 50 minutes following receipt of an e-mail. (The most common response time is two minutes following receipt of an e-mail.)

O Responsiveness to e-mail is higher during the working day (9 to 5 Monday through Friday), and lower during the evenings and on weekends.

O Half of all replies are around 40 words or shorter. (The most frequent reply length is just five words.) In addition, e-mail replies tend to be shorter later in the day and on weekends.

OPredictably, replies from mobile devices are typically shorter – as well as sent faster.

There’s a generational phenomenon at work as well. Younger people are quicker to respond to e-mail messages than their older counterparts – and they use fewer words when doing so.

For those wishing to do a deeper dive into the evaluation and the findings — along with viewing copious accompanying charts and graphs — there is a paper available free of charge, published by the World Wide Web Conference Committee. Titled Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload, its authors include Farshad Kooti, Luca Maria Aiello, Mihajlo Grbovic, Kristina Lerman and Amin Mantrach.

There’s been a good deal of discussion lately about the visibility and value of a Facebook or a Twitter post. It turns out that a Facebook post has a “shelf life” of approximately 18 hours: If your intended target hasn’t viewed it by then, chances are he or she won’t end up reading it at all.

For Twitter posts, the “useful life” is even less. Generally speaking, once your Twitter post scrolls off the viewing screen due to more recent posts coming in, it’s likely never to be viewed.

But what about e-mail messages? Seeing as how they’re targeted specifically to their recipient, surely they’re more likely to be viewed even after a lapse of time, correct?

Yes and no.

To some degree, the dynamics of an e-mail message means that recipients see them as “important” in the way that a Twitter or Facebook post might not be. However, with the plethora of e-mails being sent by retailers and other vendors – something this cheap to do is usually worth almost as much as it costs, after all – people have become less prone to view all of their e-mails.

GetResponse, an e-mail marketing firm, has also found that timing is a significant factor that affects open and engagement rates for e-mail marketing campaigns.

GetResponse researched e-mail campaigns covering the 1st Quarter of 2012 to determine how the time of day affects open rates. It found that two factors have the most influence:

When the e-mail was sent

The amount of time that elapses from when the e-mail is sent to when the recipient checks his or her inbox

It turns out that morning e-mail deployments are most popular for senders (~39% of e-mail campaigns are deployed in the morning), while afternoon deployments occur in ~26% of the cases and ~30% are deployed in the evening. (The balance happens between midnight and 6:00 am).

Interestingly, GetResponse found that “morning” opens and clickthrough rates are actually somewhat lower than those sent at other times of the day – particularly in the afternoons: Top e-mail open hours are 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm and top clickthrough rates are at 3:00 pm and 8:00 pm.

These results, coupled with the fact that more sending activity occurs in the mornings, would suggest that deploying in the afternoons would be better for engagement and to “avoid the noise.”

GetResponse surmises that the volume of e-mails deployed during the morning hours makes it more likely that recipients skip over a bigger portion of those e-mails.

But another key finding from the research is that an e-mail message is most likely to be opened within one hour of delivery (~24% of the time).

Within the second hour, that open rate declines by half, and by the third hour, it drops by an additional 30%.

By the time the fifth hour is reached, virtually no new open activity is being recorded. So it’s safe to conclude that e-mail engagement behavior isn’t really all that different from what happens with Facebook posts.

There are a couple of takeaways from the GetResponse research. Vendors should consider making afternoon deployments in addition to ones in the morning.

Also, in order to increase the likelihood that e-mails are opened within the first hour of receipt, stagger deployments by time zones (including international recipients) to conform to the best times of the day for engagement.

In the end, does getting e-mail messages into inboxes during the most receptive times for engagement make that much of a difference? GetResponse’s conclusion is that it isn’t inconsequential: Average open rates and clickthrough rates can be lifted by ~6%.